Wednesday, 2 January 2013

Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn provide an opportunity to build your brand and expand your business. Once you’re on them, measuring your success is essential to optimizing your online marketing campaign. Today, most small businesses drop the ball and forget to stay on point with their social media metrics. What they don’t know, is that measuring your social media metrics is a must if you plan to improve your standing on these sites and push things to the next level. Below, you will find 7 social media metrics that you should be tracking.

1 – Level of engagement

It’s very important to increase your presence on social media networks by interacting with your fans and followers. Your level of engagement refers to how active you are on your pages. This includes replying to mentions of your business, updating your status with company announcements, and how often you reach out to customers and communicate with them. Having an engaging presence on social media networks is big aspect to branding and it’s very important to your success. This is the number one social media metric that you should be tracking because it’s essential to everything else.

2 – Number of fans and followers

Keeping track of how many fans and followers you have on social media networks is very important. Your fans and follower speak to the success of your efforts. The more fans you have, the more interest there is in your profiles. Additionally, more fans means more exposure for your business because every fan you have can see your status updates and announcements. Keeping track of how quickly new fans are coming in tells you whether or not you are marketing your brand correctly.

3 -Reach

What size audience are you advertising yourself to on your social networks? Is this audience getting larger, or is it shrinking? The reach that you have on social networks absolutely must be tracked. This will give you a clear representation on how you’re doing and what the future could entail. Knowing how many people are potentially going to see your content is very important to knowing if what you’re doing is even worth the time that you are investing.

4 – Referrals

The traffic that your website receives will often come from search engines, but when it comes from another website, this is called referral traffic. In fact, Google Analytics refers to it as such as well. If your social media campaigns are successful, then you will be getting referral traffic. Analyzing your referral traffic and studying the bounce rate is vital. Referrals help you understand which social media networks are producing the best traffic and how your efforts are paying off.

5 – Number of mentions

Do other social users Tweet about you or mention you in their status updates? Are you ever discussed in the public eye by people other than your own employees? Knowing how often you’re mentioned and who’s mentioning you are very important factors. These are social media metrics that you should be tracking because it shows you how well branded you are as a business.

6 – Influence

When your brand has been promoted and recognized on social media networks, what influence does it have on those who see it? Does it encourage them to take action and promote your products and services themselves, or does your name slip into the back of their mind? This is metric that you should be tracking if you want to increase your referrals and reach.

7 – Success of promotions

Do you ever use social media networks to promote a coupon or promotional code for your website? If you don’t, you probably should be. Social media sites can provide a lot of traffic and promotions can improve the influence that you have over your readers. However, you still need to track this metric and produce statistics that can tell you how well your promotional efforts are paying off. How many people use the coupons that you promote and how many referrals does each coupon result in? These are important things to consider.